Is Truth (Necessarily) Opposed to Fiction?

Douglas Jones:

I agree that very serious issues are at stake here, and I do indeed think that a healthy imagination is essential to spiritual maturity. But I worry about your assumption that truth is opposed to fiction. Scripture itself repeatedly teaches truth by means of the "fictions" of metaphors and parables. When Psalm 72:3 teaches "The mountains will bring peace to the people," that is a grand fiction revealing a great truth. Mt. McKinley and Mt. Everest can't really bring peace to God's people. Christ alone does. But God repeatedly sees fit to speak to us as a poet and not an engineer. And if we aren't well-exercised in poetic, fictional thinking, then we'll regularly misunderstand Scripture and life.

Weak imaginations have always fallen before Scripture's chief enemies: legalists, rationalists, and libertines. Orthodoxy demands imagination, and so we are just asking for serious spiritual problems if we deny the imaginative life to our children.

Response, in Letters to the Editor, Credenda Agenda (11/2), p. 7.